Feature Article

For all the growth and excitement around smartphones, there are still far more feature phones out there today. To help service providers address all such endpoints, Almira Labs is introducing a collection of cloud-based services that don’t require downloads and are accessible by calling a number.

“Now every phone is an opportunity,” says Almira Labs CEO and COO, Javier Martin Lopez, who refers to the services as “Siri for the rest of us”.

Those services, which Almira delivers as part of a revenue-sharing deal with carriers, can allow service providers to leverage and grow revenue from their legacy base of feature phone users. The offerings, being marketed under the name BrainPhone Store (although carriers can brand it however they like), are available worldwide. Vodafone in Spain is one of the early adopters, delivering a Voice2Email service through partnership with Almira Labs.

Another service option available through Almira’s cloud-based offering is voicemail to e-mail. There’s also a service that provides the ability to use voice to update and communicate on social media. “Your friends and your followers don’t read you, they hear you,” notes Lopez. And there are one-way voice/video cast services, and a service that allows message exchanges with multiple parties.

Because all the applications are Java based, it’s easy for developers to customize them based on the individual carrier’s needs.

Lopez stated that these new cloud-based solutions for carriers are a perfect match for today’s increasingly software-driven world in which so many people around the world use wireless phones, although not necessarily smartphones. Of the six billion devices worldwide, only about 30 percent are smartphones, he says, and by 2016, about 63 percent of wireless endpoints are still expected to be feature phones. And while app stores targeting smartphone users have taken off in a big way, Lopez says that 70 percent of the applications available are downloaded less than 1,000 times, so many developers are looking for the ability to write their applications once and run them anywhere – and the Almira Labs platform and services are Java-based, so they enable just that.